Yvonne Heimann [00:00:00]
You're sitting across from someone in a meeting, you've done the work, you know the numbers, and when it's time to talk about what you are worth, something happens. You get smaller, you freeze. Suddenly you qualify, you hedge, you say, I think, when you mean I know. You leave the room having agreed to less, then you walked in wanting to ask for.
My guest today has tripled her salary in only three years. Not by grinding harder, not by pushing to be noticed, but by understanding exactly how the words she used about herself were shaping what other people believed she was worth. Lata Hamilton is a change leadership and confidence mentor.
A fellow NLP practitioner, and she's worked with some of Australia's biggest companies on changes that have touched over 100,000 people. She knows how to transform and how transformation really happens. And today she's bringing that knowledge directly to you.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:13]
I'm Yvi, and this is She Is A Leader, the podcast for women who are done playing small and ready to lead on their own terms. Let's get into it. And language is one of my favorite topic, actually. And I think you, as a fellow NLP practitioner, one word my team is learning to not use is "but" right now. So love having you today, Lata, and just talking about language, talking about perception, and talking about how
We can use it for our advantage. However, I want to start with one thing. There's also often a public perception of NLP where it's like, my god, you are making me do something. You are manipulating me. You are playing the game. And I would like to start talking, just taking that berry out.
How do you approach the situations where somebody is like, my God, you are talking hypnotic language patterns and and you are making me do things and you are just manipulating me. How do you approach that when somebody comes to you with that limiting belief and and you get that pushback?
Lata Hamilton [00:02:30]
Yeah, it's a great question. And I think that maybe NLP has had a little bit of a rough trot in the past in terms of it's being used by some players in a bit more of a negative way, you know, like really salesy or, you know, sort of that manipulative tone. And I think that's where people go. But the truth of the matter is actually the fact that it's just about how we exactly what you said, how we make meaning in our minds. And so you're doing it whether you like it or not. Like regardless of whether or not you know the the tips and the techniques of neurolinguistic programming, you're doing it and you're impacted by it whether you like it or not. And so I always like to say, and we do say in NLP, it's a process that's done with you, not to you. And that it really comes down to the practitioner. So having a practitioner who you know, like a w a weapon in the wrong hands can always be used for evil, but a w like a weapon in the right hands is actually can be used for so much good. And so we want to do it as a process with you rather than to you. And what I would also say is like I think when we rebrand it to sort of like neuroscience, suddenly it's okay. And often it's talking about exactly the same things. It's just that one is coming from the from the process of like, you know, the the scientific like
Technical aspect and one is more practical, which is the neurolinguistic programming. And I think with the neurolinguistic programming, it's how to actually use it in your day-to-day. It's how to actually bring it in so that it is something that you do naturally with people and that you can invite people and really help them to get clarity, to get confidence, to understand what they are looking for, help them make decisions, help them move past barriers, help them move past burdens and what I'd also say is that NLP has a lot more intuition. It's not a science. It really is an art. And there's an there's a level of intuition there. And you know, when you have a practitioner who is really coming from the heart, who really wants to just help you help people grow, develop, live the best life that they possibly can, then it's so, so, so powerful. And yeah, I think for people to just be open is is what I would say. How about you?
Yvonne Heimann [00:04:48]
I think one of my actually there was there was an interesting situation when I did my practitioner training and we went through timeline therapy and I'm like, my God, the impact that I can have with this in both sides, right? The good and the bad. I was what I was working with my coach in that moment because I'm like, I'm not doing this. I I had a complete block, I'm not doing this. And the
Some of the pieces that stuck with me is number one, it's again, it's done with you. No change is going to stick if you don't stick to it. So no matter what modality we use, no matter what frameworks we use, change and suggestion or hypnotherapy, none of that is going to have an impact if you don't allow it to have an impact.
Meaning it's gonna fall away. How often do we see habits not stick? It's the same thing, right? So there is that quote safety mechanism of nobody really can make you do anything. We can suggest things, we can help with breakthroughs, we can help with picking out specific language patterns, and we can make it easier get through specific limiting beliefs.
But we can't make you do anything. Not really. And that's that's a part that that helped me where it's like, okay, it's it's not about playing playing games or doing things to people. And then secondary was also the more I know, the more I see.
Yvonne Heimann [00:06:42]
So even if after learning everything and I've done my master practitioner, I'm looking at into trainers level two, even if I later on decide a specific framework or a specific modality, I don't want to use it, I still have the knowledge to see it, to know what's happening, and to make an educated decision rather than just cool, whatever, I just, just just a flag in the wind, to throw things at me, kind of thing. So that's how how I ended up approaching it. And then the language piece is the one that hit really hard for me, that I'm still really at the forefront of the difference between if and when.
The so for everybody listening, if and when. "If" it's gonna happen or "when" it's gonna happen, it's a complete different impact. One is a decision, you know it's gonna happen. The other one is like, yeah, maybe we don't know yet. I mentioned "but" earlier. When you use the word but in a sentence, you delete everything before that. You take everything away. I'm so sorry I hurt you, but.
The initial intent right there is like, yeah, I I don't give a shit. So coming out of a narcissistic relationship, that language piece was a lot where I'm like, there's my gaslighting coming from. Got it. So that's where where a lot of my my NLP work has been done. And also working with my clients really on that language, where you had some amazing results, right? So we talked about how you were able to triple your income in no time whatsoever. And when I read your submission, I knew exactly, I had a really good idea where you were coming from because we use, I use, I have used often certain words and phrasing that.
Without realizing is is setting us up to a situation of they're not sure about what they're doing or they don't feel like they know what they're doing. Even if we do. Even if we do, no matter how secure we are at home about what we do, the knowledge we have, the results we deliver, if we show up in a certain way with certain wording and certain phrasing, we are perceived as having no fucking clue. And I assume that's exactly what happened for you. Am I right in that?
Lata Hamilton [00:09:26]
Absolutely. I think, you know, it was really early on in my corporate career. And when I I was very confident coming into my corporate career, and then sort of like a one particular leader and the feedback that I got really trampled my confidence. Like absolutely trampled trampled my confidence. And that particular role, I had planned to be at that I loved the company so much, loved the products, loved the company, loved the culture.
And like I would have been at that company for life. I would have built my entire career there. And it was actually neurolinguistic programming, like going and learning how to be an NLP practitioner, coaching, and excuse me, that just the sheer like when you're learning it is transformative. I remember coming out of the neurolinguistic programming course, it was five days long, and it was almost like
I described it like I would be crawling out of it each night because I was so exhausted. Because all day you're not just learning techniques, tools, and techniques, but you're actually practicing it with others. Others are practicing it with you, not to you, with you. So you're it's almost like five days worth of fer therapy just going and learning it. And so that shift, that change, and then obviously working with my own coach as well transformed everything for me and it broke the loyalty that I had and it broke the blinkers that I had on that I had to stay in this company and it had to be this job for life and that there was no other path and that I had to just, you know, put up with what what was happening and climb the corporate ladder there. Instantly leaving like having broken that pattern, then I was able to get twenty thousand dollar pay rise just by moving companies. In one move, twenty thousand dollar pay rise. Then I changed careers.
Lata Hamilton [00:11:16]
And I got like a fifteen thousand dollar pay rise. Then I changed the way that I work. So I went from permanent employment or fixed term employment to what we call in Australia day rate contracting. In other countries in the world, it might be called freelancing or labor hire or you know, as we sort of like where where you're kind of paying for a day worth of work. and that's when I was able to triple my salary in the space of three years because then I doubled.
My income. So in just a short amount of time, just three years, I was able to triple my salary by changing companies, by changing the career and moving to a highly paid, female-dominated career, which is organizational change management, which is very rare. Like it's very rare to find a career that is both female dominated and highly paid. And I changed the way that I worked. And I think so much of that wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't broken that pattern of what I believed was possible for myself and what I could see and perceive, being in that environment made me open to new information, made me open to suggestion from other people of, have you thought of change management before? What's change management? I've never heard of that. It's almost like it opens up your mind to possibility, to opportunity, so that, and then it gives you the confidence to actually take that leap.
Yvonne Heimann [00:12:38]
And it it all seems to be always working with each other, right? Number one, being open and getting yourself into a container to to see things differently. And also start talking differently. So I'm curious, with changing the language, with changing the perspective, when, when women start changing their language around their own values, so not that not just in theory, it's like not just the manifesting and I'm gonna make this much money and all of the things that are out there, but really changing our patterns, changing our language, changing our perception. What does it really look like in the day-to-day? How how do we bring this change about?
Lata Hamilton [00:13:33]
So like neurolinguistic programming, it's almost like a suite of tools and techniques, but you can actually apply them in really different ways for different people and for different reasons. One of the ones that I love the most is the concept of chunking up. And so chunking up is like.
Yvonne Heimann [00:13:48]
Not me having been talking with my clients over the last two weeks about chunking up and chunking down for wait for it, change management. And my other company, we are working with it, we are we are working with a with a big company right now that are rolling out ClickUp, right? So I'm in project management and all the things, and I'm helping the project manager on the project.
With change management, because we have C level and we have our worker bees and they all need different things and everybody is fighting it because of a different reason. So I'm I'm sitting here and I'm like, yeah, explaining to the project manager on the project, chunking up and chunking down when to use it and how to use it to get buy in.
Lata Hamilton [00:14:38]
It's it's what it's one of the most versatile tools and like there's so many tools in NLP and exactly what you're saying, like you can apply it in so many ways and it can be so valuable and it can completely transform how people are thinking about a problem or about a decision or even about themselves. So let's use two examples, for example. In your personal life as a woman, if you were thinking about your self-worth, if you're thinking about career change, maybe AI is coming for your job. If you are thinking about wanting to do something different, but you're not sure where to go, what to do, I'll often say to my students, I'll say to my clients, I'll be like, you might, it doesn't matter what job title you want. If you use this concept of chunking up, you can actually open up a whole plethora of different possible avenues, careers, job paths, industries for you.
So the basic concept of chunking up is when something is higher level, when something is more chunked up, like higher level chunk, then you can get more agreement and it's wider and broader and more people are on board. When something is really detailed, down in the detail, really specific, really you know, insular and very nitty-gritty, then it's going to create more division and it's going to be harder for more people to get on board. So a really simple thing in in your career, is if you chunk up and you just ask yourself the question, what is this an example of? Let's just say I write marketing marketing emails, right? And then you could ask yourself, okay, what is this an example of? And you can say, this is an example of communications. Marketing email is an example of emails, emails are an example of communications. So you've chunked up to that next level up.
Lata Hamilton [00:16:25]
Then communications, you can then ask yourself, what's a career, what's a role, what's a job that requires communications. Every role requires communications. You know you've got that skill, that level of skill. And I feel like that's what's holding a lot of women back is the fact that they think that they only have these really niche, individual, detailed skills. But actually, if they chunk up, they take it to those next levels up, they can then transfer and like you know, becomes transferable skills. So communications is a transferable skill. And I like to say transferable skills are skills that you can use in any job, any company, any industry, any country. Communications is one of those skills, and that's what opens up your worth. You're no longer calibrating on what you've done in the past, on what you're doing today, on the nitty-gritty of your current role. Instead, you're calibrating open.
And then exactly what you're saying in projects, I do this in change management. I teach this about like how to how to do this in change management to create your benefits, your business benefits. It's like we use the simple question, for what purpose? For what purpose do we want to do this change? For what purpose do we want to do this transformation? And then I, you know, will do that with the executive team, with the board, with the project team, with the business stakeholders, whoever it is that I'm working with. And I'll ask this question, ask this question, ask this question.
They'll move through it until we get to these high-level chunks where everybody can get behind and that's how we get agreement and alignment. So it's like this one tool, this one technique from NLP. It's like the way that you apply it. So I always sort of say you can go and learn to be an NLP practitioner, but actually the magic is in how you apply it in your day-to-day work, in your day-to-day career, and how you think about yourself. That's where the magic happens.
Yvonne Heimann [00:18:15]
You get a whole bunch of tools. We're like with project management and implementing ClickUp, right? We have a lot of sometimes calls with people that love ClickUp, that are in the nitty-goody, that know ex they think they know exactly what they want. And I have to chunk them up because they thought they they have found the solution. But I'm like, but for what purpose? Why do you need this report? What do you what's actually, behind it to chunk them up, and suddenly we get to there is no purpose. It's just been, you know, like this, like this this Christmas story of that's how we always did the roast, we always cut the ends off, and you go back and you actually discover for what purpose. Yeah, because grandma did it, and grandma did it because she had a tinier stove than we have. So it's interesting just how.
How different we can use these frameworks and these ways of doing things. It's a full-on tool belt and just being able to cross-use it in so many different ways and different situations simply by adapting and like chunking up and chunking down. I've pretty much this it's been the conversation in this in this rollout because of just because of the work, yeah.
Yvonne Heimann [00:19:47]
I want to take the idea of changing how you talk about yourself and push that a little bit because right, everybody tells us, yeah, you just need to change how you think about things and how you talk about things. So it can really sound like you're just telling a woman to be more confident, right? Which puts the ba the burden back on them when actually the system is broken, right? The framework is broken. So, how can we hold both of these twos all at once? Where, yes, changing how you talk about yourself as well as you are rebuilding your confidence with it. To me, it's. It's it's a system, it's a framework, it's a view of the world we have run of not not if but when. These these little tiny switches in how we talk to ourselves, how we talk about ourselves. How do we do this with women without being like, you've done this wrong? Or just pointing fingers back and be like, yeah, no, you just got handed the wrong system, let's change the system. How do we do that?
Lata Hamilton [00:21:10]
I think there's two there's two aspects of this for me. The first aspect is you're absolutely right, the system is broken. And it's almost like like I've been reading a lot of posts and examples recently where it's you know, as soon as a profession has more women in it, so like originally computing was actually all just women, they would do c manual computing. And then as soon as it has more women in it, it's underpaid.
And then as soon as men start to get into the profession and it sort of switches over to become a more male-dominated profession, like technology IT, then then the pay rises and women start getting pushed out. So there is absolutely a system there's absolutely a systemic, now I can say that word, systemic thing that happens, even if you're trying, which is why I love organizational change management, because it's such an anomaly that it is female dominated still, like 70, like 60, 70% female, and is highly paid. Like project management is more male dominated and often change managers in Australia particularly actually earn more than project managers in many cases. And so there's there's those sorts of things and that's where I think you need to become smart.
Because there are pockets, there are opportunities, and it's going and finding those pockets and those opportunities where you're doing the same work or similar work, but being paid more for it. So you heard me say earlier, you know, I changed companies, got more pay. So I went from one particular industry, which was consumer goods, to financial services, which pays more. So instantly that meant that I was doing the same work. I was still doing marketing at that time. I was doing the same work, but I was getting paid more. Then I changed career, went from marketing to change management, made a really strategic decision to again use all my transferable skills in an in an environment that's gonna value me more and then I changed the way that I work, my employment type. Again, do exactly the same work, but just the way that I'm being paid ends up means that I was that I had doubled my income.
Lata Hamilton [00:23:20]
As we move into and as as AI affects small roles, what I think we're going to see more of is what I now am, which is an independent consultant, which is essentially you've gone out on your own as your own business and you work with a variety of clients and you do short, sharp pieces of work. So you might get hired to deliver a particular output rather than come and work for a particular number of days. Or deliver a particular output and you've been allocated a number of days, you know, to do that.
And then if you are working sort of a more of a day rate, your day rate is higher. So you're not in the employment market anymore, you're in the consulting market, which is a next branch, like next range up, and you can actually earn more. So when I moved from contracting to consulting, I tripled my day rate overnight. So that's one way where, given all of the factors that are in the system that hold women back often from you know progressing in career.
Earning our worth. That is some things that you can actively do, which isn't just dependent on you thinking, thinking more, right? Like feeling more and trying to just hype yourself up and rah-rah rah yourself up. So that's one aspect. The other aspect, which I don't think gets talked about enough when we're talking about corporate, when we're talking about career, is the fact that if you do not have safety, security, equality, and even division of physical, mental load, and emotional labor in the home, you can't expect to get that in the workplace. And I think that in in home life, women are often so like there's so much more of a burden on us to keep things going in the home.
Lata Hamilton [00:25:06]
Whether or not we have children, whether or not we have families, women are still doing much more work in the home. And in so many cases, and it's so sad, in so many countries and in so many cases, women's homes aren't actually a safe place for them. And we saw this peak during COVID, where like you're being told to stay home to stay safe, and domestic violence and family violence rates increased. So like
The place that you're meant to be the safest. It's like how do you go out into the world, out into your career, if the place where you're meant to be the safest isn't your isn't your safe place anymore? So I think you real we have to be able to address both. We can't just expect women to go out into corporate and be like, you know, pioneers and show up and shine and everything like that when they are exhausted, burnt out, and potentially not being treated well in their home life and in their personal life and personal relationships. We have to be able to address and tackle both and we can expect to get more equality in corporate when we get more equality in the home.
Yvonne Heimann [00:26:10]
Hmm, I would say we got our work cut out. And if this episode landed for you just like it did for me, do one thing. Forward it to a woman in your life who's been doing the work and not getting paid for it. Somebody who needs to hear this, who needs to know that there's women out there that are having the conversations.
That are fighting for you, that are doing the work. Might take a little bit of time, but we are not giving up and we are not bowing down. So go send somebody the episode, go give her a hug. And I'm Yvi. I'll see you next week. Lata, thanks so much for joining me today. And thanks so much for being in this work with me.
Lata Hamilton [00:27:03]
You're so welcome. Thanks for having me.